


Will, Right, Responsibility

by Rhaella



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-14
Updated: 2009-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 14:59:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhaella/pseuds/Rhaella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Idealism may not die easily, but it dies, all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Will, Right, Responsibility

**Author's Note:**

> I’m playing around with the War Chief!Master piece of fanon (pseudo-canon?), because there can’t be two renegade Time Lords who get that... tactile with the Doctor. Speaking of which, yes, there’s an element of Doctor/Master here, because I’m not sure it’s possible to write any Master without it.

He wakes up, confused and disoriented, with the words _never again_ racing through his mind: a steady, silent mantra.

It takes him several attempts to get to his feet. _Regeneration sickness_ , he realises, and the memory of the last hour or so rushes back, crude and unpleasant and altogether unwelcome. It hurt to die, more than he had expected. The last time—the _only_ time—he had regenerated, it had been of his own choosing. No slow deterioration for him, no protracted descent into his own twilight. The Doctor might have once claimed to welcome the experience of advanced age, but he himself had avoided it at all costs. He had discarded his first body when its mortality became impossible to ignore, and had intended to eventually do the same with this one, but now—

 _Murdered_ by lesser beings, by that fool of a War Lord. Murdered and then unceremoniously dumped in a storage closet, no less. As he forces the door open, trying to arrange his thoughts and memories into some working order, the War Chief—

 _No._ He isn’t the War Chief anymore.

The War Chief is dead.

The War Chief was a contingency, a fabrication, a part to play. He was a mistake, perhaps, but a necessary one. The War Lords had required a scientific adviser, a personality to complement their (numerous) deficiencies, and the War Chief had existed solely to fulfil that role. A limited identity built around the (ultimately flawed) tools he intended to use, even _named_ according to their needs and sensibilities, as if he were not a Time Lord, as if titles held no power of their own.

He will not make that mistake again.

Nameless, he stumbles down an empty corridor, one hand braced against the wall for support. When he doesn’t immediately collapse, he risks bending down to pick up a discarded weapon. The floor tilts threateningly, but the extra movement is worth the effort: the weapon is a reassuring weight in his hands. He knows that no one but the Doctor would recognise him now, but the situation has already spun too far out of control and he won’t leave anything more to chance.  
 _  
The Doctor_ , he ponders, knowing that there’s something _there_ , something he _needs_ to remember…  
 _  
The Time Lords are coming._

He freezes. He freezes, forcing himself to breathe as he recalls the Doctor’s final, desperate act. The _idiot._ The _absolute_ idiot, and it’s very little consolation that the Doctor will suffer dearly for that choice, because he can easily guess what his own reception on Gallifrey will be like. Vaporisation, enforced regeneration, a particularly nasty task set by the CIA if he’s very, very lucky. Rather more so than he’s been thus far.

He stares out at the empty, silent hallways, running through his options, considering what plea, what offer or argument has the best chance of success. Oh, it’s easy enough to escape the Time Lords’ knowledge when they are not watching—and they all too seldom are—but once one has attracted their attention…  
 _  
Empty, silent hallways._

The panic passes almost as quickly as it came, replaced by a sudden burst of laughter that he barely manages to suppress. Empty, silent hallways mean that he’s alone, left behind, forgotten. Empty, silent hallways mean that his people are as unwilling to take a second look at the universe (or _room_ , in this case) as ever they were. Empty, silent hallways mean that by murdering him, the War Lord—and may he enjoy the Time Lords’ _infamous_ mercy—likely saved his life.

The Time Lords aren’t coming— the Time Lords have already left.

*

He soon learns that stranded and forgotten feels much like imprisonment, that anonymous is near enough to non-existence.

He doesn’t much care for the sense of powerlessness that this brings.

*

Eventually he manages to scrounge enough materials from the War Lords’ (former) base to assemble one final SIDRAT. The design is still flawed; it will never survive more than a single trip, but then he only requires the one.

He should have stolen a capsule from the Time Lords a century ago.

He had taken Time Lord technology when he fled Gallifrey, but nothing more. He might have claimed that reconstructing such a device proved more than petty theft, but the truth of the matter was… well. The memory of the Doctor’s own flight—audacious and idiotic, as always—from their home world had still been too near, and he had been unwilling to replicate it in any way. Nor had he desired the attention that such an action was certain to receive.

It is easier to infiltrate Gallifrey than he would have expected.

He sees no need to justify his theft—if the Time Lords cannot be bothered to guard their possessions, they hardly deserve to keep them—and so if his first words to the TARDIS are surprisingly reassuring, it is only because she needs an explanation. _There is an entire universe out there_ , he tells her. Perhaps he cares less about it than he did before the debacle with the War Lords, but there is still so much that needs to be done. _An entire universe that the Time Lords are quick enough to ignore. A universe broken and bleeding, that you and I now have a chance to shape into something worthwhile._

*  
 _  
“To have such power at one’s fingertips—limitless potential, either for good or for evil—and to refuse to do anything with it… to insist upon isolating oneself from the universe beyond, as if that universe won’t eventually find a way in.” He briefly hesitates, for effect rather than necessity. “It’s simply despicable. Not to mention foolish.”_

 _Theta glances over at him, obviously glad for the distraction from an assignment he lost interest in several hours ago. His expression is unreadable, and Koschei keeps very still as he waits—somewhat too expectantly—for an answer. Theta won’t agree, he knows. Theta never simply agrees. They fell into a pattern of contradiction long ago, and they both enjoy it too much to stop now._

 _“Perhaps,” Theta finally allows, even though he loathes Gallifrey’s laws as much as anyone, “but does the simple fact of power grant us the right to any and all forms of interference?”_

 _“I’m speaking of a_ responsibility _, not a right.”_

 _A sharp bark of laughter from the other side of the room. “A responsibility to what?” Ushas demands. “Some universal power? Some sense of… what was that funny Earth term, Theta? Karma?” She hesitates in her diatribe, never bothering to look up from whatever extra equations she had somehow talked Borusa into assigning her. “Cosmic responsibility is nothing more than a convenient excuse for those too weak willed to admit to their own desires. Such banal mysticisms don’t become you, Koschei.”_

 _He rolls his eyes at her back and catches Theta grinning at him, conspiratorially. The silent endorsement means more than spoken agreement ever could, and he finds himself thinking briefly about the meaning of victory._

 _“I can’t imagine you as a Time Lord,” Theta suddenly tells him, and Koschei begins to laugh._

 _“There’s never before been a Time Lord worthy of the name.”  
_  
*

The Doctor is still lingering in his first regeneration—younger and older than before, but as magnetic as ever—when next they cross paths, and it is obvious (to one of them, at least) that they have crossed timelines as well. The War Lords and everything that follows are still in the Doctor's future, and the secret is almost too sweet to keep.

But the Doctor is still lingering in his first regeneration, and when they again meet, he doesn’t offer the slightest sign of recognition.

It is more painful than a mortal injury, and even as he wonders whether an identity—any identity at all—would have made a difference, even as he makes his re-acquaintance, he vows to never let the Doctor forget again.

*

He creates a new empire, once again, out of nothing at all.

He looks upon this conquest—this foundation upon which he can build a future worth having—and fancies himself an architect, perhaps, or a steward. An artist whose masterpiece is nothing less than the fate of the universe.

*

When he collapses in the throne room of a primitive planet—a planet that had barely understood that a universe beyond it existed; a planet that he had been primed to lead out of its darkness, into the light—stabbed in the back by the only specimen of this worthless species with enough insight to accept what he was willing to offer, he finally realises that the universe isn’t worth saving. The universe isn’t worth much of anything at all. It’s a game, or a joke (and not a particularly good one), and you can win or you can lose, but there isn’t any room for anything in between. It’s a vessel of chaos, spinning out of control, and it may need a man at the helm, but it doesn’t deserve such generosity.

It hurts to die.

It hurt the last time as well, he suddenly remembers. _Never again,_ he recalls having thought, and the words once more hover mockingly over the darkness of his collapsing mind, lingering long after they’ve lost all meaning. He instinctively claws his way back into existence, casting off one form for another, adrift amongst his own possibilities until he finds one onto which to hold.

The universe is no less worthless once he has finished regenerating, but he discovers that he no longer cares. And why should he? It is impossible to care about that which has no true importance. His will to conquer, to master, to rule has survived where his intentions have died with his last regeneration, and he doesn’t mourn the loss.

He doesn’t mourn the loss at all.

Picking himself up off the ground, the Master begins to laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> So my first thought upon watching _War Games_ … well, okay. Technically my first thought was “is this ever going to end?” My second thought was “why are there only about five people in a Roman legion?” So my _third_ thought concerned how I felt about the War Chief=Master piece of fanon. Because the similarities are really striking (and I’m not talking about the beard), but the differences (the Master’s totally defined by his sense of humour; the War Chief, not so much) seemed somewhat insurmountable. At first, at least.
> 
> This is (for the most part) intended to be the incarnation after the War Chief, but not Delgado!Master. It may be Delgado!Master at the end (I can’t really imagine him being that old, regeneration-wise), but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.


End file.
